James Patterson Inc. - NYTimes.com

James Patterson Inc. - NYTimes.com: "At first, Patterson’s literary taste ran toward the highbrow — Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Genet, Evan S. Connell. “I was a snob,” he says. After graduating from Manhattan College in 1969, Patterson was given a free ride to Vanderbilt University’s graduate program in English literature but dropped out after just one year. “I had found two things that I loved, reading and writing,” he told me. “If I became a college professor, I knew I was going to wind up killing them both off.”"